Windows XP Media Center Edition reviewed

A
remote-capable ten foot user interface to digital media
and television tasks

In
January 2002, I got
my first
look at Microsoft's Freestyle software--a
remote-friendly front-end to digital media tasks--and
immediately wanted it. Back then, of course, it was
unclear how the software would be delivered, and I had
hoped that any XP user would be able to get Freestyle
through a cheap, Plus!-type add-on. However, in the days
since January, Microsoft decided to ship Freestyle as
Windows XP Media Center Edition (XP MCE), which will be
made available solely with powerful new PCs, logically
dubbed media center PCs. While I understand the
reasoning behind this decision, I still have my doubts,
since there is a large crowd of digital media
enthusiasts who might have paid $50 for an add-on
package but have no interest in shelling out $1800 or
more for a new PC, just to get this software.

So what is XP MCE? Essentially, it's Windows XP
Professional Service Pack 1 (SP1) with an additional
application, Media Center, and related supporting
services. XP MCE runs only on media center PCs, which
include modern processors, fast video cards, FireWire
connectivity for attaching a DV camera, a TV tuner card
for interacting with a cable or satellite signal, and,
optionally, other multimedia features, including a DVD
writer, surround sound speakers, and front-panel access
to the types of memory cards used by most digital
cameras. This year, only Hewlett-Packard will be
shipping media center PCs in the US, and I'll be
reviewing the final hardware here on the SuperSite in
early November; this review focuses solely on the
software. But other companies, such as Samsung, are
marketing media center PCs in other locales, and
Microsoft will announce new partners and markets for XP MCE in 2003.

As noted in my Freestyle preview, the first iteration of
XP MCE is geared toward small living spaces, such as a
college dorm, apartment, or children's room, where a PC
might be an acceptable alternative to a TV, and be used
as a complete, all-in-one entertainment center. That is,
you could use the PC, normally, with a mouse and
keyboard to interact with applications like Word and
Internet Explorer (IE), as you would with any PC. But
when you wanted to watch or record TV, consume music,
photos, or digital movies in a more comfortable fashion
than is normally possible with a PC, or watch a DVD
movie, you can grab the remote control--included with
every media center PC--and sit back in a chair and
interact with the computer from ten feet away.

I don't live in such a place, however, and I wanted to
see how XP MCE stood up as a consumer electronics
device. Which is to say, I've been using a prototype HP
media center PC in my living room, attached to a 48"
rear projection TV set; it's not used like a computer,
but rather as a combination TiVo, video game machine,
and DVD player. My family has used XP MCE to watch TV
and DVD movies, record TV using the product's integrated
digital video recording features, listen to music, watch
photo slideshows, and even play some Quake III Arena.

However, it's important to remember that a media center
PC is a PC, and a very powerful PC at that. The
prototype hardware I tested included a 1.8 GHz Pentium 4
processor, 256 MB of RAM, a powerful NVIDIA graphics
card, and a large hard drive. This isn't a set-top box.
This PC, in fact, is every bit as powerful as the PC I
normally use day-to-day. This fact has many
ramifications for the Media Center experience, some good
and some bad. Because the media center PC is a PC, you
get all that a modern Windows XP PC has to offer: Almost
infinite expandability and software compatibility, a
gorgeous user interface, and ways to elegantly access
XP's excellent digital media features. But you also get
the bad stuff too: Crashes and bizarre hangs, little
video stutters that require you to restart the Media
Center application, and inexplicable recording errors
that you always suspect are somehow Windows' fault.
Yeah, it's a 1.0 product.

Is Windows ready for the living room? Let's take a look.

Media Center
Setup
The Windows Media Center interface (Figure) is
designed solely to consume digital media. That is, you
can't use Media Center to copy an audio CD to the hard
drive, create your own audio mix CDs, or copy photos
from your digital camera to the PC. Instead, you use
Media Center to watch and listen to digital content.
This content could come from your TV or, more
specifically, a cable or satellite TV connection, it
could be stored locally on your PC, or it could be
stored remotely on another PC on your home network.
Media Center has interfaces for TV tasks (live TV and
digitally recorded TV), digital music, digital photos
and other pictures, digital videos, and DVD movies.

As such, setting up a media center PC is pretty
difficult. The beta units came with a bizarre assortment
of hardware, some of which you had to use in order to
get it working, while others you had to ignore; I'll be
interested in seeing how the final hardware works.
Because I wanted to use the media center PC as a
consumer electronics device, I disconnected my DVD
player, and got to work integrating the HP PC into my
den.

This involved a number of cable attachments and
configuration settings. In my case, I wasn't connecting
a PC monitor, so the display was driven through the
hybrid S-Video Out port (it can drive a composite signal
as well, using an adapter) on the bundled Hauppauge TV
tuner card. My digital cable box was re-routed through
the Hauppauge as well--using coaxial cabling--and I had
to install Microsoft's custom IR blaster to the front of
the cable box so the remote control could, well, control
it. If you've ever used a TiVo or Replay device, you're
familiar with the slow performance of this sort of
control. When you hit the Up Channel button on the
remote, for example, the DVR actually inputs the channel
number directly above the one you're currently watching,
followed by the "Enter" command. Then, the information
is slowly transmitted to the cable box and, finally, the
channel changes; you can't just sit there hitting Up
Channel as you could in the old days. If you're not
familiar with DVRs, you might find the resulting slow
performance infuriating. However, it's not any slower
than a TiVo or Replay device.

Once the hardware connection was made, and I could boot
the device on the TV set, I moved right to setting up
the networking configuration, which is crucial for XP
MCE, since it uses the Internet to get TV programming
guide information. And, as a PC, XP MCE will also use
the Internet for whatever tasks XP Professional does:
For example, accessing Windows Update, Auto Update, CD
and DVD information in Windows Media Player, and so on.

Unlike many potential media center PC purchasers, I've
already got an extensive home network set up. So I
connected the PC, temporarily, via 100 Mbs Ethernet
cable and copied over my music and photo libraries from
the server, so I could access them locally as a typical
consumer might (of course, a typical consumer would also
need to manually create these libraries, but I've
already spent time doing this in Windows XP). Then, I
added one of Microsoft's USB-based Broadband Networking
adapters and disconnected the Ethernet cable.

Because the Media Center application will consume any
photo, music, and video libraries you have already
created, they were instantly accessible through the new
interface, though I'll discuss that below. One crucial
feature that isn't immediately available, however, is
the TV functionality, which needs to be configured with
your specific hardware and locale information. Microsoft
supplies a friendly but lengthy wizard for this process,
and you can access it later through the My Settings menu
section, also discussed in detail below.

From there, it's simply a matter of using Media Center,
and though customers can--and likely will--use media
center PCs as general purposes computers, I use it only
for its digital media interfaces. The results were often
exciting, but sometimes frustrating, especially for my
wife and son, who had become used to the relatively
speedy performance and stability of the digital cable
system we already used. On the other hand, the DVR
functionality was a huge hit with everyone, and my
family has also grown used to the video on demand and
live TV pausing features. In the next section, I'll
examine what it's like to actually use Media Center in
the real world.

Using
the Media CenterAs noted in
my preview,
the Media Center user interface is gorgeous (Figure),
harkening to the blue and green Windows XP user
interface we're all so used to today. However, Media
Center is designed to be navigated with a remote
control, and its large buttons and text make it all come
together. The remote that Microsoft shipped with the
beta units (Figure) bears only a passing
resemblance to the remote that HP will ship with its
media center PC, and Microsoft has created a standard
remote that PC makers can use or modify (HP's is
different than the Microsoft design).

The remote features a Start button for launching the
Media Center interface, buttons for Program Guide, My
TV, My Pictures, My Movies, and My Videos, and a TV/Jump
button for moving quickly to full-screen TV. It also has
a slew of standard remote buttons, which work in any of
the Media Center modules, such as Play, Pause, Rewind
and Fast Forward, Stop, and Record, for TV.

You can use the remote for navigating around Windows
somewhat as well. The navigational buttons can move from
button to button in a dialog box, for example, the
Cancel button can cancel a dialog button, and the Select
button works as OK, or Enter on your keyboard. Likewise,
you can use your keyboard and mouse to navigate the
Media Center interface if you want, though the later
will cause a surrounding border to appear (Figure).
You can also run the Media Center interface in a
resizable window (Figure). This lets you keep a small
TV window in the corner of the screen, which can be
handy if you're getting work done but still want to
watch a live or recorded show, or a DVD movie (Figure).

The main Media Center menu, or Start page, is logically
laid out with options for My TV, My Music, My Pictures,
My Videos, Play DVD, and Settings, as well as buttons
for logging out, and minimizing, restoring, and closing
the Media Center application window (Figure). I'll
discuss the main Media Center experiences below.

My TV
Arguably, most consumers are going to spend most of
their Media Center time using the TV functionality, as
my own family has done. The My TV module (Figure)
includes options for accessing the Programming Guide,
your Recorded TV shows and configuration, very basic
search functionality, and the TV configuration settings.
As with most Media Center modules, a picture-in-picture
preview appears as well; in this module, live TV is
loaded regardless of what you were viewing previously.

To watch TV in full screen mode, simply hit the TV/Jump
button and you're in. From here, TV is similar to the
experience you might have had previously with cable or
satellite TV. However, there are many improvements, and
we've come to greatly appreciate a few of these
features. For example, you can pause live TV (Figure). This is handy in a number of situations, such as
when the phone rings, someone comes to the door, or as
is so often the case in my house, our young daughter
wakes up crying and needs attention. Media Center, like
other DVR products, caches the incoming TV signal on the
hard drive for about an hour, letting you come back
later and continue watching. If you think you'll be gone
longer than that, just start recording (more on that
below). You can also fast forward and rewind through
live or cached TV (Figure), mute the sound (Figure), and raise and lower the volume, all of which
trigger attractive on-screen displays. Overall, the live
TV functionality of Media Center is on par with other DVRs I've tested.

The Media Center Guide (Figure) is wonderful and,
unlike the other TV functionality supplied by the OS,
quite a speedy performer. The Guide is loaded
periodically from the Internet and stored locally, which
might account for the performance gains. However, the
channel numbers are laid out backwards, so that the
higher numbers are at the bottom of the screen. This
leads the illogical act of pressing the Up key on the
remote to move down in the channel list. The Guide also
includes a small picture-in-picture display, so you can
continue to watch live TV as you browse around, and a
handful of small ads, similar to what you might see on a
Web page. However, unlike programming subscription info
from TiVo or Replay, the Microsoft Guide is completely
free, a huge improvement over rival products. Thus, this
feature beats out any of the consumer electronics
competition, though of course the underlying hardware
purchase price is considerably higher.

The Recorded TV section of the My TV module lets you
manage your recorded television shows. Here, you can
view programs you've already recorded--such as the
plethora of Scooby-Doo episodes my son craves (Figure)--look through the pending recordings you've
scheduled, and configure recordings. Recordings can be
manual--simply hit the remote's Record button once while
watching live TV, and the current show will be
recorded--or more intelligent. For example, you can
navigate through the Program Guide, select a show you'd
like to record, and hit the Record button once. This
will display a single red circle on the show in the
Guide (Figure), indicating that the show will be
recorded. Hit the Record button twice, and you can
record a series; this displays a series of red circles
in the Guide (Figure). By default, Media Center
considers a series to be first run and reruns on that
channel only, but you can change this through the
Recorded TV interface (Figure). For example, you
might want to record the Simpsons on every single
channel, at any time, and keep the episodes until you
decided to delete them. This feature is very well
implemented, and on par with other DVRs. It's also a
Godsend--my entire family has come to rely on the Media
Center's DVR capabilities, and we all have shows
scheduled now, which we can watch at any time.

It's also worth mentioning
that recordings you make with Media Center can be backed
up to recordable DVD, or copied over a network, and used
on other XP SP1-based PCs with Windows Media 9 Series.
Originally, Microsoft had planned to disallow this
functionality, due to piracy concerns, but its customers
complained enough that the feature was restored.
Recordings are stored as regular files in the Recorded
TV folder under Shared Documents. More information about
this functionality is available in my new Technology
Showcase,
Copying Content in Windows XP Media Center Edition.

Media Center's TV Search section is one of the weak
points. On our AT&T digital cable set top box, my four
year old son had learned how to navigate the box's menu
system, and could find children's programming with its
Search functionality. On Media Center, Search is
designed for one purpose, and one purpose only: To find
shows to record. What you can't do with it is find shows
that are on right now. So, sadly, my son is unable to
find children's shows that are on right now, pick one,
and watch it. Microsoft admits that this is a
limitation, and the company will probably fix this
problem in a 2003 software update. You can search by
show name or keyword (Figure), however, and if
finding shows to record is what you're after, it works
fine.

Overall, the TV functionality in Media Center is superb,
with a few glitches.

My Music
The My Music module (Figure) is fairly
straightforward, offering simple access to audio CD
music you've copied to the hard drive with Windows Media
Player. The main view displays recently played music,
and you can access your music library via Albums (Figure), Artists (Figure), playlists, or genres. Like
other modules, My Music includes a small
picture-in-picture window, which can display live or
recorded TV, a photo slideshow, a DVD movie, or a
digital video, whichever you happened to be viewing
before you entered this part of the UI.

Where My Music excels is in its gorgeous displays. You
can view an album via song list (Figure) or per song
(Figure), both of which are attractive. You can also
integrate a music playlist with a photo slideshow, which
we'll discuss in the next section. Being a Microsoft
product, you can even buy related music online (Figure), and this is one of the many places the Media Center
interface breaks down: When you choose this option, the
Media Center resizes and an IE window loads, bringing
you to the Windows Media Web site (Figure). Yuck.

Also like other modules, My Music includes a basic
search feature (Figure), but it doesn't seem to offer
much beyond artist search.

Overall, the music functionality in Media Center is
attractive and fun, with no major disadvantages beyond
the fact that you'll need to use XP's built-in tools to
copy audio CDs, and create playlists, two skills that
might be beyond typical consumers' capabilities. I'd
like to see these functions brought into the Media
Center for a future release.

My Pictures
Like My Music, My Pictures (Figure) is designed
solely to consume a particular type of digital media, in
this case digital photos and other pictures. It
integrates with your My Pictures and Shared Pictures
folders, and lets you view photo slideshows, of
individual folders or your entire collection. The effect
is wonderful, even mesmerizing if you have a bunch of
personal photos, as I do (Figure), stored on the
computer. What makes it even better is the way you can
integrate a music playlist with a photo slideshow: Just
queue up an album, artist or genre playlist in the My
Music module, switch to My Pictures, and start up a
slideshow: The music will play in the background as you
watch the slideshow full-screen (Figure).

What's amazing here is how universally enjoyable this
feature is. Scoff if you will at the modern equivalent
of a gathering the family around the slide projector,
but there's something very compelling about the
randomness of the images that appear. I've been taking
digital photos for over two years now, and I've got
thousands of images from family events and vacations,
work trips and trade shows, and other events, and as the
images fade in and out you never know what's coming
next. It's quite neat. You can control the slideshow
through a basic UI (Figure) as well, changing the
transition time, and determining whether it displays
images randomly, or utilizes subfolders.

Curious as it sounds, this one feature is always the big
hit when I show off the media center PC to friends and
relatives, most of whom aren't technophiles.

My Videos
The My Videos module (Figure) will probably be the
most under-utilized portion of the Media Center
interface, since it comes with the most baggage. To
fully utilize this feature, you will need a DV or analog
camera for recording home movies, the know-how to use a
video editing application such as Movie Maker, and the
time and desire to make and edit your own home movies.
That said, you can save such movies in your XP My Videos
folder and access them through the My Videos module in
Media Center if you'd like.

Digital movies work just like any broadcast TV program
or DVD movie, in that you can pause, stop, play, rewind,
and fast forward through them. The movies play
full-screen by default (Figure), and the quality will
naturally vary according to the source material.

Digital home movie making is only now coming into its
own, and hopefully consumers will start taking advantage
of some of the exciting possibilities in this market. In
the meantime, I decided to keep my own home movies out
of the media center PC for space reasons: I didn't want
to clog up the hard drive with the many GB's of movies
I've created, and opted to use that space for recorded
TV shows. If this were my only PC, I'd get a second hard
drive dedicated solely to home movies.

Play DVD
The Play DVD module lets you interact with DVD movies
(Figure) using the same pleasant UI Microsoft
provided for the TV and digital video modules. This
means you can pause (Figure), stop, and navigate
through DVD movies, and do all the other sorts of tasks
you'd expect. The HP media center PC uses the excellent Intervideo DVD decoder to supply DVD playback, and the
performance is top notch. We never witnessed any of the
sorts of glitches I've come to expect from laptop-based
DVD playback.

One other nicety is that the DVD playback uses the
Internet to retrieve title and chapter information about
the movie you're watching. So as you skip around the
movie using the remote, you'll see the current chapter
heading, as well as the movie title, onscreen. Good
stuff.

Settings
In the Settings module, you configure such things as
appearance, UI sounds, the remote, your Internet
connection, TV and DVD settings, recorder settings, and
so on. Many of these settings are available in the
various other modules, and some are presented when you
first set up the media center PC. Most of it is pretty
straightforward, though a few options trigger IE or even
a Windows dialog box, which can be disconcerting.

Where
Theory and Reality Collide: Problems with the Media
Center
And that, really, is the overall problem with XP Media
Center: Too often, the underlying OS peeks through,
which can be off-putting when you're sitting on the
couch holding a remote (though I did end up purchasing a
wireless keyboard and mouse for the media center PC as
well). In other cases, the underlying OS is simply
required, for example, if you insert a new CD that you'd
like to copy, as there's no way to do this from the
Media Center UI.

In the end, the Media Center interface is most clearly
defined by the fact that it is part of Windows XP, and
running on a real PC. This isn't a true consumer
electronics device, in that, yes, it does crash (Figure), and I occasionally had to reboot the system to get
things working again, leading to explanations about why
I was "rebooting the TV," which didn't go over to well
with my wife. Other times, we'd be watching TV and there
would be a small glitch, and then the voices were "off"
from the actor's lips, maybe by a second or two. This
was infuriating, and often led to me shutting down, and
then restarting, the Media Center interface (which
worked).

In fact, before I received the final software build, my
wife was ready to chuck the whole system, due to various
bizarre issues. However, most of these problems--aside
from those I mentioned above--were fixed by the final
release. I'm looking forward to the final hardware,
however, to see how it all comes together. But my cable
set-top box and DVD player have never crashed, not once.
XP Media Center needs to reach this level of stability
before its going to be a viable option for most
consumers. I'd rather see the stability of the consumer
electronics device world make its way into the PC world,
rather than the reverse.

I also have concerns about how this system will perform
in the real world, when it's being used as a real
computer. Will it stand up to simultaneous Quake III
deathmatches and DVR recording sessions, for example, or
any other combination of high bandwidth activities? I
don't know, and though Microsoft assures me these
scenarios have been successfully tested, I have yet to
do so myself.

Other concerns include the price--because media center
PCs are high-end computers, they will come at a
premium--and the fact that digital media enthusiasts,
who already own high-end PCs, won't be able to get the
software separately. While I understand why Microsoft
decided to go the integrated route--which, frankly, is
complicated enough as it is--I still feel that they're
leaving a large market untapped by this decision. The
company knows this, however, and things could change in
the future. In 2003, for example, XP Media Center will
get a fairly major software update, other PC makers will
come on board, and Microsoft will begin targeting other
markets, including Europe, with the new version. Time
will tell if a software-only solution, or perhaps an
inexpensive package including the software and
remote--will eventually be made available to consumers.
I hope so.

Timing and
Delivery
Windows XP Media Center Edition has been finalized, and
Hewlett-Packard media center PCs should begin shipping
by the third week of October 2002. I'll report back on
the hardware when I receive a unit later this month, and
certainly the stability of the final system could be
much higher than what I observed with the beta machine.

HP media center PCs will
retail for $1300 to $2000. The high-end version features
a recordable DVD drive and a 5 speaker stereo system.

Conclusions
I really enjoy using Windows XP Media Center Edition,
and despite some glitches and missing functionality, no
one in my family would be happy to see the media center
PC go. We've come to really appreciate the DVR
functionality, especially, and the seamless way it has
totally changed our TV viewing habits. On that note, I
don't feel that Media Center is a good solution for
people with decent PCs who are looking to add DVR
functionality in the den. However, for the market
Microsoft is targeting with this first release--those
with limited living spaces--the media center PC is an
excellent all-around solution, and an exciting advance
on the digital media experiences the company bundled
with Windows XP. I just wish, again, that the Media
Center software was
made available to a wider audience.